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This week marks 20 years since Hurricane Katrina blew the doors off a late American summer, and all my memories, still swirling, come down to one man. One anonymous man.
A few days after the levees failed, The New York Times sent the gifted photographer Nicole Bengiveno and me to join its coverage of the catastrophe. One hot evening we were driving through the post-storm stillness of a catatonic New Orleans when something in the middle of a downtown street caught our eye. It couldn’t be. Could it?
It was. A man’s body, rigor-mortis stiff and partially covered by a blue tarp. Two traffic cones served as a bright-orange headstone.
I reported what we’d seen to a state trooper around the corner. He told me that the body, that of a Black man, had been there for days; a murder victim, possibly. In fact, the trooper said, he was the one who put down those traffic cones to prevent the body from being run over.
When six National Guardsmen approached the corpse a few minutes later, Nicole and I relaxed in the belief that the disturbing matter was being handled. Instead, the guardsmen gawked at the body, two of them made the sign of the cross, and then they left, though one paused long enough to take a photograph.
What were we witnessing? Where were we? Would this dead man be left there had he been white?
We returned in the morning with the expectation, the hope, that the corpse would be gone. But there it was, symbolizing a city in such disorder that it could not even collect its dead.
As Nicole drove on, I sat beside her and wrote down what I was seeing for a deadline story. We would return before nightfall to learn how it would end.
I was a small part of an enormous effort by The Times to cover Hurricane Katrina, a singular natural disaster that flooded four-fifths of New Orleans and caused an estimated $125 billion worth of damage along the Gulf Coast. It claimed around 1,400 lives and upended millions more, the communal pain eased only by passing years.
My privileged assignment was to wander. No news conferences, no government gotchas, of which there were many. Just wander postapocalyptic New Orleans with a notebook, a pen and plenty of bottled water.
An unsettling Mad Max vibe coursed through the city. Pickup trucks with armed men of unclear authority cruised around, sunglasses enhancing their menace. City buses were everywhere yet going nowhere; abandoned. Cars drove the wrong way on one-way streets, and no one cared.
In some neighborhoods, a watery curtain slowly receded to reveal a light-brown coating of crud on the streets, on the ruined cars, on the corrugated side of a Baptist church. The lapping darkness evoked death, a feeling underscored by the search-and-rescue flatboats skimming its ominous surface.
The ubiquitous fleur-de-lis had been replaced by a spray-painted X, signaling that this emptied house, this shuttered storefront, had been searched. An accompanying zero meant no bodies, but sometimes there were numbers.
The smell of rotting food wafted from closed restaurants in the French Quarter. A market in the Garden District, its doors agape, had been ransacked of pretty much everything but postcards. A bank’s plate-glass door on St. Claude Avenue had been shattered, by either a pickup or a sledgehammer; depended on which traumatized resident you talked to.
Dusk was approaching, and Nicole and I headed back to Union Street. That body could not possibly still be there. This was the United States. We collect our dead.
Still there.
Sitting in that rental car, I concluded the account of my dystopian New Orleans journey with: “Meanwhile, back downtown, the shadows of another evening crept like spilled black water over someone’s corpse.”
In the months and years that followed, I returned often to New Orleans to write about its first post-Katrina Mardi Gras, its slow recovery, its resilience. Alone in a Bourbon Street bar one night, I nearly wept when a zydeco band began singing “Iko Iko” into the emptiness.
And I never forgot that anonymous man. A year after the storm, I went back to track his journey. His body had been collected the morning our story appeared on the front page. It was placed alongside other corpses in a refrigerated truck, then driven to a temporary morgue set up in a rural town about 70 miles from New Orleans.
There, battalions of pathologists, investigators and counselors did heroic work in responding to the forensic nightmare dreamed up by Katrina. They attached names to hundreds of bodies, allowing for the small blessing of hundreds of memorial services and proper burials. But scores of the dead remain unidentified, or unclaimed.
Those never named or claimed are buried now near a Hurricane Katrina memorial in the city’s Charity Hospital Cemetery. Among them, most likely, is a man whose body lay exposed for days on a downtown street of a major American city. Twenty years; I see him still.
Dan Barry is a longtime reporter and columnist, having written both the “This Land” and “About New York” columns. The author of several books, he writes on myriad topics, including New York City, sports, culture and the nation.
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